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The most poignant exposition of the heart of Psalm 23 is Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, the piece that brings together Psalm 23 and Psalm 2. The pure soprano singing in Hebrew, "Adonai, is my Shepherd", draws you into the security, peacefulness and contentment that underlies the lovely word Shalom. But just as the still waters and green pastures come into view, the melody is shattered by aggressive male voices singing in Hebrew, "Why do the heathen rage?". The entire history of persecution, conflict, rage and violence against other human beings is encapsulated in that musical yell accompanied by explosive drums drowning out the melody of human well being.

So when I read Psalm 23, and come to that verse that says "You spread a table in the presence of my enemies" I wonder if it is a taunt song line, a mockery of the enemy by our joy, prosperity and power – a kind of Nan, na, nana, na. Other psalms do the taunt song very well, and to sing the words of some of them on our football terraces would result in immediate prosecution. But there’s another way of singin those words…..

I remember a moment of sadness that became a moment of truthfulness, and then a memory that changes the way I hear the word ‘enemy’. Having visited the place where "Silent night was written, we went next day to an Austrian village, and went into the church to cool down – and to pray. In the cool of the village church we looked at the beautiful black marble memorial plaque – a young German soldier, rifle thrown aside, holds his dying friend and in German, ‘Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’. He too had been knitted together in his mother’s womb – he too no matter in heaven or hades cannot escape the presence of God; he too was fearfully and wonderfully made, in the image of God.

At the front of the church was the altar, where bread is broken and wine poured out, and where the people of God gather to celebrate the sacrifice of Christ for the sins of the world. The great gift of God to the church, and the great gift of the church to the world, is a table that proclaims peace, that is the enactment of reconciliation, that is open and inviting to all who will come, and yes, which far from taunting my enemy, is the place of welcome, the embrace of acceptance, the shared sorrow for a broken world. And shared joy that the world is redeemed by the love of God in Christ, so that with good faith, with strong hope, and gently persistent love, we finish the psalm, "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life". So no place or time for that perfect hatred, instead the voice that sings of peace is finally able to be heard without interruption.

The Psalms force us to be honest – we do dislike, even hate; we are people with prejudices; we have long memories about people who hurt us; there are some things that to us can never be forgiven or forgotten; try as we will, there are times when it is impossible to move on, get over it. Which is why we regularly meet around the table in the presence of our enemies – to be reminded of how God treats enemies, and to pray that the bread and wine, symbols of a fruitful earth and the passion of our God, will be medicine to our souls, and healing to our hurts. And to seek and humbly receive that grace to enable us to live as blessed peacemakers, ministers of reconciliation, people who walk the banks of the river of life where the leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations. People who sit at a table spread not by us but by God, and in the presence of enemies break bread, and offer it to this other human being whom I no longer will call, enemy.

The Poem "How do I defeat my Enemy" by Michael Rosen, is a profound and searing indictment of the modern nation state and its political cynicism. The primary concern is not what is right, or good, or has ethical principle – but what is in the interests of the state, regardless of ethical fallout. 

In Christian spirituality sin can be so personal and so petty, so visible and obvious – but sometimes sin is insidious, toxic, insinuating itself not only into human hearts but into human structures. Who is the enemy? And why do I need to, wanto, defeat him or them? Psalm 139 describes the beauty, the dignity, the uniqueness of each individual human being. In a prayer poem a prose chain of beautiful phrases are used to describe the process of creation. God is like an artist, with care and vision, skill and that gift of bringing out the once in the life of a universe specialness of this one creation, this one individual, this person – me, you, him, her. And then there’s the end of the Psalm, which clatters on the floor like a dropped baking tray interrupting a Baroque oboe concerto, about hating those who hate God with a perfect hatred – despite the deep truth of the Hasidic ethic, that to kill a human being is to kill a universe.

We live in a world where such precious, unique, dignity and worth are, according to the Bible, to be accorded to each person, made in the image of God. Yet we inhabit a world of suicide bombs, improvised explosive devices, remote controlled drones, death by enemy action and friendly fire, – it is such an unpredictable, complex, confusing and heartbreaking reality, this life that is both precious and disposable.

And Psalm 139 captures it with the kind of honesty we may find it hard to take. “See if there is any offensive way in me”. The psalmist has just spouted an atrocious hymn of personal hatred, following on a beautiful song of human worth, dignity and God given value. This is hatred in the name of God, and it isn't only a historical fact, or something that happens elsewhere. In Scotland, sectarian attitudes come very close to this religiously inspired hatred, this distorted, grotesque view that God can be co-opted to be on the side of our prejudices and hatreds. Followers of Jesus can never say, ‘I hate with a perfect hatred those who hate you’ – why – because while we were God’s enemies Christ dies for us – oh and that verse begins, ‘God commends his love towards us in that….’

The poem in the previous post asks a question that for me lies at the heart of the Christian Gospel, and therefore at the apex of Christian witness to the subversive reality and radical call of Jesus Christ. "How shall we defeat the enemy?" At church today I was leading the Remembrance day service, and reflecting on what we understand by the word enemy, and its connection with fear and faith. The next three posts share the gist of what I was trying to explore. Three Psalms informed my thinking; the first is psalm 46.

When we come to church, we come to the place where God expects us to be honest, but often enough we try to be pious and spiritual and behave the way we think God expects. But seldom does God expect what we offer, and not often enough do we offer what God expects. We just don't see ourselves clearly enough, our self-awareness is clouded by our self justifying habits of mind, and ready made excuses reduce our sense of unworthiness to stand before the Love that knows us to the depths of our being.

The Psalms are a powerful corrective to that unreality, indeed dishonesty, with which we view ourselves. They are laced with raw emotion – glad gratitude, honest hatred, aggressive anger, silent serenity, hard won hope, downward dragging despair, jubilant joy – and that inevitable and recurring tension in mind and soul, of faith and fear. In Psalm 46 there is a towering confidence, "God is our refuge and our strength…", that defiance that looks at the worst and won’t run away. "Though” – though mountains shake; though the seas roar and foam – that word "though" contains most of the things that can go wrong in our lives and in our world. It is a hinge point in the Psalm, and a picotal word of faith. Whatever it looks like, it looks different when God is in the picture.

We now live in a world where it seems most of the things we thought were fixed and given, have been shaken and may be taken away – from personal pensions to world peace, our children and grand-children’s future now threatened by an impoverished world – global recession, accelerating consumption of earth resources, the spoiling and soiling of the planet.

Psalm 46 is no escapist vision – it is faith calling in question the way things are – and saying the way things are can be changed by a different vision – God in the midst of the city. Political uproar is nothing new, nations in turmoil is the story of history, war threatened by the brink of economic collapse is a recurring crisis in our human story. But against that threatening sky, the Psalm speaks of "the river that makes glad". Instead of panic, gladness, instead of terror, trust, and in place of resignation, hope.

That verse must be interpreted beside Rev 22.1 Another river flowing from the city, and there are trees growing along this river, and the leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations. In our day it is the eurozone that may "fall into the sea", the collision of religious and political ideas that "roar and foam", the shift of economic power to Asia has "nations in uproar", the evidence of a planet anaemic from being drained of its life-blood feels like "the earth giving way". And still, and yet, there is need for that people who witness to the leaves of the tree that are for the healing of the nations.

Remembrance Sunday is when we remember the cost of war, and though we say we will not fear, it is right to fear the possibility, the reality, the consequences of war. V9 is one of those verses that is both comfort and terror – "He shatters the spear". But if the spear is pointed at me and God breaks it then I am saved; if I am pointing the spear at a dangerous enemy and it is broken, I am defenceless. At which point, and only then, the command of God is heard, “Be still and know that I am God…..I will be exalted…"

Being still is hard for a technological, consumer growth driven world. But sometimes faith has to rest content without practical answers – and acknowledge that God is within this glorious, tragic, rich, broken but beautiful creation and only his promise she will not fall. But alongside our renewed trust in the redemptive love and costly mercy of God, we have to face with honesty one of our deepest human  wounds – our love affair with hatred, which I'll reflect on in the next post..

The activism that is generated by Evangelical experience, and which is a largely unexamined element of Evangelical spirituality, worship and church lifestyle, has made Evangelicals at best impatient and at worst suspicious of the contemplative tradition of Christian spirituality. Not that many Evangelicals would have much interest in harking back to the privatised spiritual traditions of French Quietism, or the apparently world denying flight of the Desert Fathers and Mothers away from a sinful world, in their criticism or rejection of the apparent passivity and introspection and individualism of such self-absorbed piety. Always assuming such parts of the varied Christian tradition were known well enough for such critique, and assuming even more doubtfully whether such criticisms of Fenelon, Francis De Sales and the Desert Fathers and Mothers are anywhere near the truth and realities by which these earlier Christians lived.

But there is within Evangelicalism an inner reluctance to validate forms of prayer other than petition and intercession and personal devotion, and a dismissive superiority when comparing the activism of an evangelistic imperative and impulse to mission, with a more monastic and meditative approach to the world, to God and to the relations between them. As with much of my own thinking, I don't see an either-or here – I am pleading for a both-and. Only as the church learns to recover and practice its contemplative disposition to the life of the world, the church and the created order of God, will it have some deeper and fuller sense of what mission is in that world, and its own purpose within the creation and redemptive goals of God, and therefore its call to adapt and respond to this context of time and place that is our own peculiar calling in history . 

Contemplative Mission sounds like an oxymoron, a strained attempt to bring two mutually exclusive mindsets together. But I am not so sure. It may be that if mission is building a city, contemplation is designing and planning it; if mission is the artistic masterpiece of God executed by the church, then contemplation is the artist seeking vision, shape and composition in those preliminary sketches, essential to the completion of that realised vision in beauty and truth.

Thoughtful compassion is another form of contemplative mission. John Stott in a small Falcon publication on mission reminded Christians decades ago of the call of Jesus to practice "uncomplicated compassion". By that he meant no ulterior motives – you make friends to make friends, you care because you care, you reach out because that's what you do. It isn't a preliminary tactic for evangelism, or to create a chance to witness – the act of love in the name of Jesus is its own witness, the reaching out is to embody the way Jesus is, you care because God has shown his care for you and you live under an imperative of love, so you love for no other reason, benefit or goal.

Add to that the word thoughtful, look at the world around and bring thought to bear, ask the questions that matter about peace and its absence, pervasive and chronic hunger, persistent intractable injustice, gratuitous systemic cruelty, lethal levels of poverty – and then ask what is to be done. And the answer won't always be obvious, there may not even be one, humanly speaking. Contemplative mission means a disposition of caring about the world around us, noticing what is going on, seeing the global and the local and the glocal as that God loved world into which Christ came and comes, pervaded by the Spirit of God, held in the purposive intentionality of the Creator Redeemer.

Thoughtful compassion is to think God's thoughts after Him, and to align our affections with the faithful mercy, redemptive patience, and imaginative energy of Divine Love described as inexhaustible, immeasurable and indescribable. Thoughtul compassion embodies, and then seeks ways of practising so that the inexhaustible becomes available, the immeasurable visible and the indescribable finally described in the miracle of God loving through human acts of kindness, conciliation and caring. The photo of Dorothy Day shows how radical that can be – the face is that of a thoughtful, compassionate confronter of injustice, in the name of the God made known in Jesus

Contemplative Mission is that inner disposition of the Body of Christ that is patiently attentive, thoughtfully compassionate, humbly receptive and intelligently critical in its outlook not only on the world but on the church. And for each contemporary follower of Jesus that same inner disposition is developed not in programmatic activism justified by the word missional, nor by that too confident diagnosis of what is wrong with the world, nor with the church's uncritical view of its own message as embodying the essential and authentic Gospel. That Gospel is vaster than the church, a mighty cataract of grace and truth, an infinite eternal mystery of Divine Love that simply overwhelms our categories and conceptual controls. As well stand under Niagra with a bucket and think we have captured all that is important in that endlessly thunderous torrent.

To be patiently attentive is something I find very difficult, and I'm not the only one. Our cultural instincts for more speed and endless novelty, constant challenge and continuous change, making money and saving time pay, are now so deeply embedded in our minds and souls that maybe an authentic 21st Century Christian spirituality is about recovering these remorselessly receding gifts of human consciousness. I'm writing this while listening on Spotify to some of the most beautiful music I know.

Now here's a question I've been meaning to ask myself for a while – is multi-tasking the ability to do a number of things in synchronised activities, but doing none of them with our whole heart? Can I be patiently attentive to two things at once? The music is background, the writing is foreground – I'm aware of the music, its loveliness at times makes me slow down on the keyboard and listen with mind and heart as well as ears. But then thoughts interrupt, and the inner structure of emotion formed by harmony and rhythm are deconstructed, as the mind goes chasing after these urgent thoughts I'm keen not to lose.

Patient attentiveness cannot multi-task. It is the gift of paying attention to the other, it is the opposite of self-preoccupation, and it isn't in a hurry to speak, to understand or to control. There is a radical humility in that inner act of surrendered selfishness. Yet paradoxically it is in so doing we are likely to reach a deeper understanding of this person now patiently attending to the other. Because patient attentiveness is a prerequisite to being able to interpret ourselves, our world, our neighbours, and that cultural context which so insidiously and patiently shapes and moulds us in its own image.

So having said all that, I've just put on Gabriel's Oboe again, and patiently attended to a melody that performs what great music often does – breaks the heart while healing it, and strengthenes the will to surrender to that which is greater than it, and reconfigures our fugitive feelings into a new resolve to live attentively, patiently, as a child of a Kingdom where seeds grow slowly, but towards the fulfilment of fruitfulness.

The photo looks across Loch Skene, one of the places where occasionally I try to be patiently attentive. 

Beauty is its own language, and beyond words.

Description diminishes rather than enhances beauty.

To look, and see, is a prayer of thanks.

Delicacte fragility of informal geometry.

A world of loveliness enfolded in fragrance.

The precise arrangement of crumpled petals creates beauty by accident.